Blog Entries

Salesforce Spring ’17 Sales Cloud Feature Review

The new Spring ’17 update of Salesforce brings a suite of features to the Sales Cloud platform. Here I break down the new features and updates that I am keen to share and excited to use.

Collaborative Forecasts

Now here is a feature that i thought was on the chopping block, but here we are and it has got a fresh coat of paint and is now Lightning ready. I am sure this will make some Sales Cloud Lightning Experience users very happy or enable them to make the switch.

Sales Path becomes Path

The Sales Path feature that was previously only available in Leads and Opportunities is now a global feature. Salesforce have renamed the feature to just Path and expanded its use to Quotes and to Custom objects.

This is a fantastic feature for providing stage based documentation and context for users. This will become a part of every Lightning Experience implementation (I believe).

Quote Updates in Lightning

Quotes was tacked onto Lightning in the last release which was good for exposing the functionality that still needed to be driven from Salesforce Classic. Spring ‘17 finishes the job and Quotes (and Products) are now full featured in Lightning.

There is a new window for easily adding products, quantities as well as a new system for emailing out your quote PDFs directly from Salesforce.

(Oh and Quotes also gets List View Kanban and the ability to set up Path.)

Contracts and Orders

These objects were severely hampered. I have had to build custom versions of both for customers just because they did not have all the object features available for customer specific customizations.

Now you can use Custom Actions. Doesn’t sound like much, but this will start making these objects useful and a viable option for customers to use.

Opportunity Products in Lightning Experience

Like mentioned in the Quote Updates, Products for Opportunities gets the new Product selector window that makes this a feature now Lightning ready.

List Views in Lightning Experience Default to the Last One Viewed

Every time I have rolled out Lightning for a customer the user feedback has always been that the Recently Viewed list view is not helpful to be defaulted to for every object.

This will be a small but impactful change for users.

Kanban

This is now a game changer. Another feature that was tested on Leads and Opportunities is now available for all objects and custom objects (not for Knowledge or Tasks though.)

Kanban can be customised with the stages that are shown at the top, what is summarised in each column and the fields that are on the list view. This is now customisable by the end user as well, so they can set their list views up with Kanban how they like.

Can’t wait for this one!

Tasks become Lightning

Tasks are getting an update which makes them more inline with what we were used to in Classic: follow up tasks, recurring tasks, save and new tasks and tasks (and events) are now searchable.